Tuesday, 31 January 2012

I won’t go as far as to say I felt sorry for Fred Goodwin on hearing the news the disgraced former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive had been stripped of his knighthood.But it’s impossible to escape the conclusion he has been sacrificed to appease the blood lust of the baying mob.While he hasn’t been found guilty of a crime – the usual reason for the withdrawal of an honour – Goodwin was heavily censured in the official inquiry into the collapse of the bank which required a £45 billion state bailout.However by snatching back the bauble, the whole honours system has been demeaned rather than enhanced. It smacks of Stalinist rewriting of history.The fault is with those who bought into the Goodwin myth – the board and institutional shareholders – who couldn’t rein in the man’s expansion mania once he had nabbed NatWest.To its eternal discredit the Labour government which knighted Goodwin for services to banking in 2004 encouraged the banker and his ilk in the financial services industry’s rush to the precipice a few years later.Taken together with the flak directed at current RBS chief executive Stephen Hester which led him to waive his £1 million bonus, we are witnessing the swing of the public opinion pendulum against all things City of London.It’s been a long time coming and is an expression of the pain being felt in the country by the economic squeeze.Although the greed and recklessness of the banking community precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, bankers have been judged to have got away scot-free.It seems incompetence and negligence are charges that can brought against, say, train drivers but not bankers who cost taxpayers billions and destroy others’ livelihoods – if not lives – while continuing to enjoy their fat salaries and bonuses.The playing field will never be level. But the City has been put on notice; it cannot escape accountability from its paymasters, ultimately you and me.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Grapefruitcrazy

I’m not going into that good night – gentle or any other way – for as long as possible. Hence the launch of this blog in December 2009 a month before my 65th birthday.
Why the blog's name? When my doctor temporarily prescribed statins to reduce my cholesterol levels she told me to exclude grapefruit from my diet. I received the profoundest sense of my own mortality.
I’ve never liked grapefruit but now banned they called to me siren-like from supermarket shelves.
Forbidden grapefruit, it can only be a short step until my body was denied solid food and then oxygen itself.
Originally a cultural blog subtitled last stop before the abyss, after building a large archive, I re-launched in a new guise in March 2012 and again in April 2014.
My interests are widespread; by nature I prefer to look forward rather than back. I’m male; divorced with grownup children; a retired national newspaper journalist; and a Londoner. GC